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PC Backup and Recovery, by Brian Harney. |
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Removeable Hard Drives |
Below, is a drive bay by Dataport by CRU Inc
and costs $50 at CompUSA.
I bought an in-store brand at CompUSA for just $30,
which is shown below.
The connectors on the cheaper bay look about as sturdy,
and Aug 2001 to July 2003 I've inserted the drive cartridge
perhaps 400 times and I've not had any problems.
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This cheaper bay does have gotchas...
The dust door doesn't always close properly, when the drive cartridge is removed, because of the weak spring,
and even though it has a lock, someone can still inadvertantly pull the cartridge out far enough, while locked,
to drop power to the drive, and possibly corrupt the drive contents.
You have to power-down your PC before removing or inserting the removeable drive bay cartridge, which is not
a big deal with me.
I bought a second bay for my other PC,
and now I can move the cartridge between PCs easily. Back in 2001, I bought a new CompUSA 60gb 5400rpm
hard drive for $120 to put in the drive cartridge. You can now get 7200rpm drives for about $1 per gb, or less.
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The box, what to look for at CompUSA.
Note that it's called "Hard Disk Enclosure" on the box, but the little booklet that comes with it
calls it a mobile drive rack (see below). drive bay manual
Two drive cartridges (without the rails), one empty, the other with hard drive inserted.
The aluminum panel on top slides back, for installing the hard drive into the cartridge.
Same thing, but from a different angle.
Small fan in front of the cartridge, to cool the drive.
How the drivebay looks in my NEC PC.
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This is how the drivebay looks in my Gateway.
The motherboard interferred with installing the drive bay
back as far in the PC case as usual, but it still works fine.
drive bay manual
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